Cancer Bitch

One Feminist's Report on Her Breast Cancer, Beginning with Semi-diagnosis and Continuing Beyond Chemo, w/ a side of polycythemia thrown in **You don't have to be Jewish to love Levy's rye bread,
and you don't have to have cancer to read Cancer Bitch *** Cancer Bitch comes to you from S.L. (Sandi) Wisenberg in Chicago

This morning we took Jo and Sam out. They flew away. What is away? Jo flew into the distance. Sam flew across the street then plopped onto the grass next to the curb for about 10 minutes. He (I could identify his gender by two black dots on his wings) flew back and plopped down on the driveway next door. I brought him to the flower bed in front of our house and he stayed there for hours. So he has not finally flown the coop. L took George out into the flower bed and left him. George is the butterfly with the very crumpled wings. We await the emergence of the last Monarch from the last chrysalis. I spent an hour last night watching Jo suck on watered-down honey. Do they feel pain? It was so sad to see George try to move his wings to no avail. Online there are instructions on mercy killing: squeezing to death inside paper towel vs. slowly freezing to death in the freezer. Quick I think is always better. L couldn't find George later on today. Did a bird eat him? Nature took its course. Whatever that means. Nature always takes its cruel course.

L believes in Monarch butterflies. He believes they are important. He planted milkweed. When we see a Monarch pass by, we note it. But we have not seen flying Monarchs in the last few days. This is because our home is becoming a hospice for Monarchs that are already dying as they emerge from the chrysalis. Right now there is Jo, hanging on a pansy.

Her underwings were folded at the top, symmetrically, so it didn't look so bad. But evidently the folds are a problem, or maybe there's a problem we can't see. She has been hanging and occasionally opening her wings for two days. I made drops of water and some watered honey available to her, though I've read that they don't need to eat for two days. It's supposed to take them between a half hour and two hours of hanging before they fly away. Then there is Sam (also female), who emerged or eclosed tonight. She was doing something funny with her eye. It may have had to do with her right antenna that was way behind instead of in front. The left antenna was behind, too, but didn't seem to be a problem. Or maybe she was fusing together parts of her mouth to form the proboscis. A butterfly's face is a mix of black and white, and all of it is very small, and hard to see exactly what's going on in it.

Then there is George.

L found him tonight on the fake antique Swedish chest, where their box is set. He must have crawled out of the box and fallen down. He was half out of the chrysalis. I helped him out and now he has crawled up the side of the box. His wings look like they're made of used chewing gum. (I am not sure of the gender. The first two are female because the veins are thick and there are not the two black dots on the wings that males have. I can't see much of George's wings.) There is one jade-green chrysalis left in the box. I bought them for L for his birthday. I bought him five, by mail, from Shady Oak Butterfly Farm in Florida. The first two emerged without problem. They were just suddenly there, in the foyer. Two others had smashed wings, and the third died in situ. We got four more, for free, but they had transit problems and arrived late, with butterfly blood (black) smeared on the inside of their white box and its attendant cotton. We took pictures and left a message with Shady Oak. I have spent hours online reading about Monarch hatching. There are people who trim wings, who detach defective wings and glue on a new one (that they just happened to have around). There are people who get tiny slivers of bamboo and glue them somehow to a bent wing. We are not those people. We are like hapless villagers in the midst of a war, not knowing what to do with wounded alien soldiers in our midst. Where is the Red Cross? Where is God?

Me, a high school summer when I worked at Astroworld; I wish I still had that blouse.

There was a booklet that I think was sent out to incoming freshman (as we were called) in Ye Olden Days. Or maybe we got it in our Orientation packets. Maybe it was called Facebook. It consisted of photos of the 1800 or so of us in the class, with home street addresses and names of high schools. I'd wondered briefly from time to time where it was. When I was home this week I came across it. I found that my first oncologist at Fancy Hospital was in my class, and I wondered what happened to the guy I had a crush on that first year in the dorm. We were friends. We ate breakfast together often, and I remember being disappointed when his parents came to visit and he didn't make sure that we met. I don't think I embarrassed myself with any overt overtures. Thank God. I'd thought about him from time to time but could never remember his last name. I remembered he was from a suburb of a big city, a suburb with a magical name I'd never heard before. It sounded like the name of a fairy tale.

Well, there he was in the Facebook booklet. I knew he'd been pre-med. He is an oncologist and surgeon in the suburbs of another large Eastern city. Patients have reviewed him favorably.. He saved the life of someone's father. One grumbly patient said he was ignored for hours and then the doc asked him what he was doing there, said there was no time for him, that he had been squeezed into the appointment book that day. We don't know, of course, if this patient was screaming at the time/totally off his rocker. That is the value of online, anonymous comments.

This doc was in a video advertising the hospital he's with. He says he enjoys getting to know patients in this small hospital, getting to know their families, about their travels, etc. He seems sincere. He had an thin though owly face in college; here his face is filled out. What I can't get over are his eyebrows. In the Facebook photo, they're pretty flat with just a slight curve. In the video they're almost a semi-circle.

Can eyebrows change that much? Has anyone studied this? Perhaps detectives who deal with missing persons have. I'm not going to look it up.

Oops! Surely I didn't miss the deadline for sending in pics!

My eyebrows are pretty much the same as they were in high school.

Because they are fake. I lost much of my eyebrows during chemo and they didn't come all the way back. Plus we lose our eyebrows with time. They migrate to our chins. Anyway, I use a mascara-type makeup to fill in my eyebrows. Sometimes they're too thick and I find out, in the middle of the day when I'm looking in a mirror, that I've been Groucho-like all day.

I nosed around for the doc's CV, family, publications, etc. It seems that he's guarding his privacy. Afraid of being found by old wanna-be girlfriends? Or--maybe he's gay and wants to keep it close to his vest. That would explain how he could resist my charms at 18, when my face was still oval and my eyebrows thick enough to pluck.

When I worked at Astroworld we had a yearbook. I remember dressing as Groucho for a picture and I was so convincing that girls did a double-take when I went into the locker room to change back. I can't find that picture but here I am the summer before senior year of high school, in the 1890s store, where I worked with the silhouette artists.

Saint Michael and the dragon, Valencia, c. 1405; I don't know why I'm always drawn to images of him and the dragon; I have one in my office. I like the fact that in any depiction of him there's always the dragon, even if at the very very bottom of the picture. Here, of course, the dragon is shown larger than the would-be saint.

1. The Person from Porlock was Coleridge's excuse for not finishing "Kubla Khan." The Person interrupted Coleridge from his poem and so it was published unfinished. How lovely it would be to publish all our work unfinished. The Person from Porlock is Oscar Wilde's Bunbury--being one character's excuse (Ernest or the other one?) for having to travel to the country. Bunbury was always sick, and the character's aunt (sometimes played campily by a man in the play "The Importance of Being Earnest"), who makes unintentionally funny pronouncements, criticized Bunbury for not making up his mind whether he was going to die. He was less real than Cory Booker's T-Bone, who turned out, it seems, to be a composite. Commentators have made much of the name Bunbury, pointing to its gay associations. They've made much of the name Ernest, too, as having the same associations. Alas, in Stoppard's play about E.A. Housman, he asks the question whether Housman was the one more punished than Oscar, because Housman was thwarted in his romance with a straight college friend, and had no others, and Oscar lived and loved. He became himself. He was himself. If the flamboyance was himself. Or were the velvet and lilies and pronouncements, an act to cover up--what? Insecurity? A sense of inferiority from being Irish and gay? From being different? If I throw it in your face that I'm different that you can't throw it in mine. The pre-emptive strike. Which is all the rage these days. Ask North Korea.*

2. The Person from Porlock is the man's Angel In the House, as written by Virginia Woolf. The perfect woman, the Angel, takes care of the house and everyone in it and so does not protect her own art. Does not value herself. Does not put herself first. Or second. There is the husband, the children, the house. Not sure of the order. In (Jewish) summer camp there was a sign in or outside the mess hall: 1. God 2. You 3. Me.
That is not the priority of the artist. Unless God=the muse. Then all is in its place. L accuses me of protecting my time but not valuing his. Which is probably true.
Woolf tells us that she had to kill the Angel. Which reminds me of the wrestling of Jacob and his Angel. He had to kill that Angel, too. It would be interesting to see a depiction of Woolf wrestling and killing her Angel.

Jacob wrestling his Angel, Giulio Benso, 17th century

3. I wanted to get off Facebook because I was thinking about it too much. It was my billboard, ready to take my least thought. And I mean least. And that is the problem. We think that each small notion must be trumpeted. I have been in Texas. I took a picture today at lunch of a wall of Local Option (restaurant owned by B, whose sister was my high school best friend), which showed the plat of the local area. There was Confederate House. That's what I took a picture of. My mother remembered it. It was a restaurant, she said, with a big sign when you walked in that said they reserved the right to refuse service to anyone. The servers, she said, were black. The restaurant served Southern food.I wanted to put the picture on Facebook. So I sent it to my husband instead.

4. Exhibit B. Front page of the Houston Chronicle. The above-the-fold story was about taking "heroic" from the phrase "heroic defenders" of the Alamo in state textbooks. Below was a photo of two black men--and they were not criminals! One was a true hero--a firefighter who died in 9/11 and the other was a man who was holding the picture of the dead hero. I wanted to put that on Facebook but instead texted it to my husband.

5. Exhibit C. At services yesterday the family choir (mostly children) sang Adon Olam, one of the most-anticipated songs always because it is the last (my mother's most anticipated line is, You may be seated.), to a familiar tune. It was from "Hamilton" but I couldn't place it, couldn't place it, then did--Here's probably the originator of the juxto. I wanted to post that on Facebook. But instead sent a link to L and some others.

6. The urge to communicate. The urge to communicate small bits. I was writing in fragments in grad school, 1981-83. My natural pace. I was rarely conventionally linear.

7. The confession: I was reading the famous anonymous op-ed and interrupted myself to go into the other room. How long is it? Maybe 900 words. How could I be so distractable?

8. Coffee can make you concentrate and it can also make you more distractable. By you I mean me. Of course.

9. Still bitter that an editor told me to write something any way I wanted so I wrote it in numbered segments (as I had for a predecessor of his) and he took them out, then complained because I didn't have transitions.

10. Do I read books? I read whole plays. There are people, authors, who, as service to other authors, list the books they're reading in the signature lines of their emails. People ask me what I'm reading and are always disappointed because it's not the literary fictions that are just out. What I've been reading: the Stoppard plays "Arcadia" and "The Invention of Love" (about Housman) and "Indian Ink." I am slowly reading and savoring "The Torch in My Ear," the middle of a three-volume autobiography by Elias Canetti, winner of the Nobel Prize for "Crowds and Power," which I haven't read. I bought the book at the Neue Museum in New York because much of it is about Vienna. I'm toward the end now, about 1929, when he's working temporarily in Berlin and provides little word portraits of John Heartfield (see below) and his brother.

Heartfield (ne Herzfeld) anglicized his name during the Great War to protest German nationalism and anti-British sentiment. George Grosz, we read, introduced him to Dada. Canetti went to Berlin in order to meet Grosz, as I have yet to do; it will take place in the next few pages I read, I think.

I don't know why Heartfield's work is considered montage rather collage. It may have to do with the arrangement of images of whole objects instead of pieces or to do with photography. I will look it up. No, I will leave it to you to look up. Stopping to look things up (which is what I did when I was writing this blog daily) is the Person from Porlock. The Person from Porlock, instead of knocking on the writer's door, instead moves her hand to Google, like the spirit that moves the heart-shaped device of a Ouija Board.

11. But I am still going to post on Facebook as Red Fish Studio. It is my marketing activity for my editing and coaching services. You should follow it. Really.

*When I was an undergraduate, I wanted to ask my history professor about the practice of personifying countries: What did it mean when we said, "England didn't want to do ...." or "Germany declared war"? but I didn't know it was a smart question. Here I used "North Korea" so I wouldn't have to look up the spelling of the Great Leader's name.

I can't tell you how anxious I was yesterday all day, and the night before, about the prospect of getting back on the water--starting rowing season. Was I afraid I would fall in? No. Was I afraid I would catch a crab, which is the term for getting your oar "stuck"? No. Was I afraid of causing the boat to turn over? No. I had walked off the dock a few years ago, backward, and fallen into the non-salt water equivalent of Davy Jones' locker. Truly, the Chicago River is as dirty and grimy as a seaman's locker could get. Toxic. A guy from the park district told me a couple of years ago they'd found a horse in the water. Which wouldn't be too bad. One horse in all that H2O--no big deal. It's the nastiness from the tanning industry and so many other industries that have dirtied water that was perfectly clear, we imagine, beforehand. Cow parts, pig parts, offal. ("Offal" conjures up puns that are too easy here.) No, it wasn't the water. It wasn't that I wouldn't have the strength to row. Especially because I expected we would do mostly drills and not heavy rowing.

This is the general idea--though these oars look très trèslong.

It's a general sense that I don't belong. Belong to what? I'm not sure. Belong to our rowing group? (I know we're a team but it doesn't feel like a team. I've only competed in one regatta.) It's because I doubt my rowing. When I took piano so many years ago I never memorized the notes. I used the numbers on the staff, which referred to the fingers you would use to play the notes. I keep feeling, after almost nine years, that there's something deep and essential yet ordinary and fundamental that I've missed in rowing instruction. I feel it more with the indoor machines, which we call ergs. I know what it is, in fact. We're supposed to "connect" with our cores. I haven't quite figured out how to visualize that and how to do it and wonder how I've gotten this far (which apparently isn't very) without doing it. In the old days, the first two coaches called me "uncoachable" when they were talking between themselves. The other thing we're supposed to do is push with our feet. I swore, after about five years, that I'd never heard any mention of that. This was at our rowing camp intensive weekend about four years ago in Michigan. OK, so now that I was hearing about the feet for the first time, how did I do it? I couldn't coordinate myself to do it. It may have been because I hadn't discovered the optimal way to adjust the attached boat shoes in the scull (the boats we use). You can move the shoes along a slide to make them closer or further from the seat, which itself rolls back and forth. Moving of the shoes involves unscrewing wingnuts first of all. And it's hard to keep them from hiding after you've unscrewed them. The best thing is to keep them loose and not take them all the way off. Anyway, my arms are long in proportion to my legs and I assumed that was why I didn't know where to set the shoes. Or why when I set the shoes where I thought they should be (and there's a way to measure, depending on what angle you hold the oar, but there's never any time to figure that because you don't pick up the oar until you have your shoes set and anyway, I've forgotten what the angle is) I still couldn't gain enough control of my feet to push down on them against the hull of the boat. It is such a difficult thing. By "it" I mean everything connected to rowing. There are terms like "to be at the catch," which means to be sitting forward as in the photo above, with your knees up and the blade of the oar in the water, ready to sweep through it, and the opposite, "at the finish," when you're laying back with the oar against you. I've been doing this almost a decade and the only way I remember which is which is that the "I" in "finish" is a short "I," as in "rib"; seriously, that's how I remember that "finish" means the oar next to my ribs. When it takes you almost a decade to come up with that mnemonic, and what's more to need that mnemonic, it would be a wonder if I weren't anxious at the notion of getting back in a boat.